Devil's Bargain

To understand Donald Trump’s path to the White House and Hillary Clinton’s downfall, journalist Joshua Green says you have to begin with Steve Bannon. In only a few months, Bannon went from the alt-right powerhouse leading Breitbart News, to the CEO of Trump's campaign, and finally to his current position as White House Chief Strategist. Green joins us Monday to tell Bannon’s story - how a brilliant and charismatic man from the fringe of American politics helped “storm the presidency.”

Related Content

Hillary Clinton was regarded as the front-runner in the lead up to 2016 election. She was arguably the most experienced presidential candidate in history, running against a man with no political experience. So how did she lose? In a new book, reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes try to answer that question. Yes, she faced external challenges, but Parnes and Allen place much of the blame on the candidate herself. They’ll join us to explain how Clinton made her sure-thing victory an uphill battle.

In her latest book, media analyst Brooke Gladstone tries to understand the current landscape of “fact” and “truth” in the United States. Facts, she says are crucial for negotiation and compromise in a democracy. Truth, though, is subjective. So how have we reached a point where reality is so fractured? Gladstone joins Doug to talk about lies, the Trump administration, journalism, and why we all need to know more about each other's truth.

Thursday, we’re talking about President Donald Trump’s relationship with the country’s intelligence agencies. Our guest is Tim Weiner, who has written books about the FBI, CIA, and President Richard Nixon. He warns that Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and his crusade to stop leaks have historical precedents in Nixon’s ultimately self-defeating actions. We’ll talk about that, and explore what Trump’s leak of classified information to Russia could mean for national security.

In 1996, New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer was assigned a profile of Manhattan businessman Donald Trump, and it wasn’t long before Singer realized this was no ordinary subject. The piece has been called one of the best pre-campaign portraits of Trump there is, but Trump wasn’t impressed. He wrote Singer a note to call him A TOTAL LOSER whose WRITING SUCKS! Well, Singer’s at it again with a book that revisits his deeply reported, psychological portrait, and he joins us Tuesday to talk about it.